Facebook found that initial principles of React Native—serving as a single asynchronous, serializable, and batched bridge between JavaScript and native apps—made it harder to build features.

But the React JavaScript UI framework jumped from 20 percent in 2017 to 25.77 percent in 2018. Slightly more popular was Spring, the Java framework, at 25.9 percent.

"Imagine an HTML developer who has to ask a Java developer to link together page A and B," he wrote in a blogpost. "That's where we were.